Last week, the Eastern Orthodox Church,
a communion of 14 autocephalous, national churches with roots in the
Byzantine Christian tradition, concluded an historic synod on the island
of Crete. Decades in the planning, the Pan-Orthodox Council
, known
officially as the Holy and Great Council,
was meant to gather patriarchs from all 14 churches for deliberation on
a series of issues in contemporary church life, including marriage,
fasting, the Orthodox “Diaspora,” and relations with non-Orthodox
Christians. At the last minute, four national churches, including the
largest, the Russian Orthodox Church, declined to attend—a fact that,
notwithstanding the protests of the Council’s supporters,
seems as a practical matter to undercut the Council’s significance.
Nonetheless, the Council is noteworthy for what it had to say on several
topics, including the persecution of Mideast Christians and human
rights in general. On the latter, the Council’s documents reveal, once
again, important differences from the consensus understanding in the
West.
First, though, a word about the churches that stayed away. From what I can tell, most (but not all)
of these churches demurred in part because of concerns about what the
Council might say about relations with other Christians. Ecumenism
occasions much dispute within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Some,
especially in monastic communities, believe that ecumenism implies that
Orthodoxy has abandoned its claim to represent the one true church. Even
referring to non-Orthodox Christians as “churches” can cause
controversy.
In its declaration, “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World,”
the Council adopted (with all respect) a rather lawyerly solution. Yes,
the document indicates, there is only one true church, and that is the
Eastern Orthodox Church. But “the Orthodox Church accepts the historical
name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions that are
not in communion with her and believes that her relations with them
should be based on the most speedy and objective clarification possible
of the whole ecclesiological question.” In other words, the Council
accepts that, historically, other Christian communions have been called
“churches” (some of them, even, have been called “Orthodox Churches”!)
and will work to clarify the situation. It’s an irenic statement. We’ll
see how it is received, especially by those within the Orthodox fold
who do not think clarification necessary.
Notwithstanding this
hedging on the “ecclesiological question,” the Council did go out of its
way to decry the persecution of Christians, Orthodox and non-Orthodox,
in the Mideast today. In fact, it condemned the persecution of other
religious minorities in the Mideast as well. The encyclical
issued at the conclusion of the Council states, “The Orthodox Church is
particularly concerned about the situation facing Christians, and other
persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East. In
particular, she addresses an appeal to governments in that region to
protect the Christian populations—Orthodox, Ancient Eastern and other
Christians—who have survived in the cradle of Christianity. The
indigenous Christian and other populations enjoy the inalienable right
to remain in their countries as citizens with equal rights.” The Council
refers to two Christian bishops, one Eastern and the other Oriental
Orthodox, who were abducted two years in Syria and whose whereabouts are
still unknown.
The Council’s official documents also speak about
human rights generally—demonstrating, once again, how important the
idiom is in contemporary debate. Today, everyone from secular lawyers to
church patriarchs declares a commitment to the ideal of “human rights,”
based in the concept of “human dignity.” It is the price of admission
to polite discussion. But the Council’s documents reveal, once again,
how differently people understand those terms. In today’s human rights
discourse, people use the same words but mean very different things.
The
Council’s official documents are not always easy to follow, but, taken
together, they stand for these propositions: Human dignity derives from
the fact of divine creation; human freedom, correctly understood, is the
freedom to progress toward spiritual perfection in Christ; and a
secular understanding of human rights, which promotes subjective
individualism and a disregard of Christian tradition, is a grave
mistake. None of these propositions, especially the last, would receive
the support of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. Like the Russian
Orthodox Church’s 2008 statement on human rights, the Council’s
documents offer an alternative model, a challenge to the subjective,
more or less secular understanding of human rights that most in the West
take for granted today.
The Council’s treatment of religious liberty, in particular, reveals this disagreement. True, the Council says
it endorses the “fundamental human right of religious freedom in all
its aspects.” Yet when one probes deeper, one sees a profound challenge
to the typical understanding of religious freedom in the West. For
example, most Western human rights advocates, even from Christian
traditions, would say that religious freedom requires state religious
neutrality. At a minimum, the state cannot unfairly promote one
religious group or viewpoint over another—by forbidding proselytism, for
example.
For its part, the Council insists on the distinction between church and state. But it does not endorse separation. Instead it calls on
“local,” that is, national, Orthodox Churches to promote a “new
constructive synergy” with the secular state, in order to ensure
“earnest cooperation in order to preserve man's unique dignity and the
human rights which flow therefrom.” These statements are not entirely
clear, but they imply a rather closer relationship between church and
state than many Western human rights advocates would find comfortable.
Close cooperation to promote human dignity—a dignity understood in
expressly Christian terms—is not what most Western human rights
advocates envision when they think about church-state relations.
Moreover,
the Council’s documents contain a significant omission with respect to
the right to convert. Whether religious liberty includes the right to
change one’s religion is one of the most debated topics in international
human rights law today. Most human rights advocates maintain that such a
right exists; the Universal Declaration on Human Rights expressly
refers to it. But the language of international human rights treaties is
not entirely clear. Many states, including many Muslim-majority states,
resist the idea that one has a right to change one’s religion; and many
states, not all of them Muslim-majority, restrict proselytism. Russia
comes to mind.
The Council doesn’t expressly take a position on
the question, but its descriptions of what religious liberty means
conspicuously omit any reference to the right to convert. Here’s one
example, from the Council’s closing encyclical:
A fundamental human right is the protection of the principle of religious freedom in all its aspects—namely, the freedom of conscience, belief, and religion, including, alone and in community, in private and in public, the right to freedom of worship and practice, the right to manifest one's religion, as well as the right of religious communities to religious education and to the full function and exercise of their religious duties, without any form of direct or indirect interference by the state.
It’s hard to imagine that the omission was accidental. The Council’s closing “Message”
likewise omits a reference to the right to convert. At the very least,
the omission signals that the Council is not comfortable with saying
that a right to convert exists—a position that, again, places the
Council at odds with the secular human-rights consensus and, indeed,
with the current position of the Catholic Church.
The Council’s
official statements join a list of human rights declarations by
religious bodies, all of which conceive of dignity and rights in ways
that differ from the standard Western versions. What effect the
Council’s statements will have, including within Orthodoxy, remains to
be seen. The documents now go to the local Orthodox Churches, including
those that declined to attend, for consideration. The synod of the
Russian Orthodox Church, for example, plans to take up the Council’s
work at its next scheduled meeting,
this month. Whatever their long-term significance, the documents reveal
yet again that, when it comes to issues like human rights and religious
freedom, it’s worth looking behind the slogans. Surface agreement on
terms may mask a profound disagreement on underlying concepts.
Mark L. Movsesian co-directs the Tradition Project at the St. John’s Center for Law and Religion.